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New Research From Psychological Science
A sample of research exploring income inequality and racial bias, support for resettling refugees, and self-referential stimuli in working memory. Visit Page
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Girls Are More Engaged When They’re ‘Doing Science’ Rather Than ‘Being Scientists’
A psychological study suggests a way to keep gender stereotypes from discouraging girls’ persistence in science activities. Visit Page
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To ace your Ph.D. program interviews, prepare to answer—and ask—these key questions
You’ve made it to the last step of the Ph.D. application process: the interview. Congratulations! But amid the excitement and butterflies, don’t neglect the crucial next step: preparation. Grad school interviews—in which aspiring graduate students meet with prospective advisers, colleagues, and other students—are opportunities to connect, engage in scientific conversations, and get a hands-on feel for the graduate programs and broader communities. To make the most of them, you need to prepare in advance so that you can confidently and thoughtfully answer questions from faculty and department members who are deciding whether they want to invite you to join them.
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An expert on human blind spots gives advice on how to think
David Dunning, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, has devoted much of his career to studying the flaws in human thinking. It has kept him busy. You might recognize Dunning’s name as half of a psychological phenomenon that feels highly relevant to the current political zeitgeist: the Dunning-Kruger effect. That’s where people of low ability — let’s say, those who fail to answer logic puzzles correctly — tend to unduly overestimate their abilities. Here are the classic findings from the original paper on the effect in graph form.
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What Science Can Learn From Religion
Science and religion seem to be getting ever more tribal in their mutual recriminations, at least among hard-line advocates. While fundamentalist faiths cast science as a misguided or even malicious source of information, polemicizing scientists argue that religion isn’t just wrong or meaningless but also dangerous. I am no apologist for religion. As a psychologist, I believe that the scientific method provides the best tools with which to unlock the secrets of human nature.
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Scientists are working on a pill for loneliness
Loneliness is part of the human condition. A primeval warning sign, like hunger or thirst, to seek out a primary resource: connection. Millions of years of evolution have shaped us into creatures who need social bonds in the same way that we need food and water. And yet we increasingly find ourselves isolated. Loneliness is no longer a powerful enough driver to break us out of the silos created by modern life. Like our insatiable love of high-calorie foods, what was once an adaptive tool has become so misaligned with the way we live that it’s causing, in the words of the former surgeon general Vivek H Murthy, an “epidemic”.
